At a loss for words?
July 30, 2008
I never played Scrabulous, the Scrabble imitator W4I1L1D2L1Y4 popular on Facebook. Personally, I don’t like playing regular Scrabble because I view it as a no-win situation as someone who makes a living with words: if I lose, I’m a dope; if I win, I’m supposed to.
Still, I read with interest the decision by the Scrabulous creators to remove their game from Facebook after Scrabble-maker Hasbro filed a lawsuit against the online application developed by two brothers from India in 2005. Many of my friends played Scrabulous, among a reported 500,000 users daily, so I’m sure they were upset. Members of a Facebook group, “Save Scrabulous,” were posting last night and into this morning, annoyed at Hasbro for ending Scrabulous and replacing it with their own, inferior version.
“To say that I was disappointed is an understatement,” one wrote. “Will we ever get closure? Are thousands upon thousands of us doomed to live the rest of our profiled lives with our unfinished games in internet limbo?”
But another user pointed out Scrabulous was a blatant Scrabble knock-off and was surprised it took Hasbro this long to file a cease-and-desist order.
I guess the moral of the story is Scrabulous was quixotry. You can’t score a triple-word score circumventing copyright infringement laws.
D2A1N1N1Y4 J8A1C3O1B3S1, Legal Affairs Writer, with an assist from Pholph’s Scrabble Score Generator.
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